Welcome to the Baby Soundscapes Project information page!

Thank you for your interest in our study. This page includes information and updates about the project, as well as links and contact details for taking part. The project is funded by the National Deaf Children’s Society.

About our project

Get involved

This study is now closed to participants. You can see a summary of the results here.

More about the project

We want to understand more about the everyday sound environments of deaf babies and toddlers in order to find out whether radio aid technology (which is commonly used with older children) might be helpful for very young children.

Hearing aids and cochlear implants help by amplifying speech sounds in quiet situations but they are less effective when there is background noise or when the sound of interest is at a distance of more than one-two metres. For babies with hearing loss it is hard for them to notice the sounds that are further away from them and so they might miss out on learning about what those sounds mean.

Remote microphone technology might help deaf babies to understand the sounds around them more effectively but we don’t currently know whether this is the case, or how best to use this technology with this age group.

We have developed a series of questionnaires for parents of both deaf and hearing babies to fill in to help us find this out, and we will use the results to develop guidelines to support parents and professionals.